developer of game 'Rust' talks about anticheat on linux
developer of game 'Rust' talks about anticheat on linux
This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn't take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully...... even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope....
It's almost like client side anti cheat doesn't work and if proper server side anti cheat is made it wouldn't matter what platform the client is on.
"never trust the client" is pretty much a motto of infosec, idk what the hell game devs expect
See, the wild thing is that I used to run with some actual hackers in GMod... and... I learned from the exploits that they did, how you actually design at least a game mode script that can't be fucked, can't be poked proded or queried directly.
Of course, if the actual exploit is lower level than what I'm writing at, well then I'm still fucked...
I can remember at least one GMod originated, lower level exploit, caused by Garry leaving some direct, unsanitized interface to Steam itself directly exposed via lua... which caused Steam/Valve themselves to step in and rewrite a part of all of Steam, because Garry is s fucking moron, and more or less allowed a virus/malware to propogate through Steam itself, independent of Garry's Mod...
Never did figure out if any of the goobers I knew had any direct ties to that or not.
But anyway, fucking yes, literally never trust the client with anything beyond their own GUI, and barely trust them with that, don't just let them click on anything in their screen space to see if its an item they can put in their inventory, do an actual server side vector ray trace, from the item to the playet, make sure the thing they clicked on is actually near them, put that all into a buffer that locks up if they're calling it at inhuman rates...
It was so easy to item dupe and stat boost and even hijack other players accounts in so many gamemodes I saw.
Fucking one of them had the user set and enter a login password to 'access' their various characters, pick one to spawn as.
Problem?
... That gamemode was actually doing the id check via SteamID, duh.
The username/password thing was a fucking phishing scam, that game mode had a forum, everyone used the same user names, a bunch of people got their hotmails or whatever fucked, by the dev of that gamemode.
... Anyway... yeah, I learned all this infosec type shit first hand, in an earlier 'FacePunch Studios' production.
Fuck Garry, fuck FacePunch, these people are idiot clowns.
Roblox exists now, the GMod roleplay communities independently invented their own ways of monetizing their gamemodes via syncing to their sites and forums with payoal widgets, ya'll missed the boat on that one, no one is going to play S&ndbox in anything close to GMod in its heyday numbers.
And this naïve understanding of infosec somehow makes people forget that this is not infosec, and there is more to anti-cheats than ignoring a client which says its travelling at warp speed.
It's not a motto. It's a given must design. (I have work context)
The Problem is that that would increase the load on the server as well as make latency-mitigation much harder.
As with everything, it‘s always a tradeoff.
The issue with pure client side is latency. At some point, you need some kind of predictive client side to smooth out the gaps to feel playable, but that also can lead to rubber banding and jumping around.
They're totally different scenarios. How is the server supposed to know if a player has (e.g.) walls disabled and knows where the enemies are?
Because the client has to know where the enemies are while still hiding it from the player.
People who have no idea how things work and go off on quotes they see online is why these discussions are useless.
If your objection to client-side anti-cheat is that it "doesn't work" what till you see what server-side anti-cheat fails to accomplish!
There's no way with a pure server-side implementation to even try to work out whether the client is using an aimbot or wallhack. No solution is perfect, which is why the best solutions try to combine methods.
These people are delusional, don’t listen to them. Their cognitive dissonance drives them to jump through the biggest hoops to defend something that is simply flat-out wrong. You can't beat most cheaters with a server side anti cheat only, unless you do what World of Tanks does and have everything server-sided which isn't feasible for all games. Take CS2 or CS:GO for example. The game is riddled with cheaters, despite getting multiple VAC updates this year.
Why would you even send the location of players behind walls? You can just do the visibility check on the server first. But hey that's extra CPU cycles that they don't want to be spending on helping you.
I don’t pay multiplayer. That said, what if there is no anticheat? Would that level the playing field? Let everyone aimbot if they want to.
It will ruin the experience for anyone playing competitively in a ranked mode, which means invalidating that mode entirely. This drives players away from competitive games like CS, Valorant, etc. which is why those games all use anti-cheats.
Similarly if there is a persistent world or some state that the game relies on to make the game fun for everyone, e.g. extraction shooter, MMORPG, etc then if the game state's integrity is compromised it loses meaning entirely. Imagine playing chess but your opponent can move the pieces any way they like; it stops being a game.
I do agree that games where everyone agrees on cheating should allow it.
You use both server and client side anti cheat.
Using only one will not work the way it should.
That, or cloud gaming needs to replace it.
All client anti-cheat have server components, otherwise they will be bypassed.